NVIDIA VDPAU Performance With The GeForce GTX 980

Now having done the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Linux review with plenty of OpenGL benchmarks and yesterday running a bunch of GTX 980 OpenCL benchmarks, for your Sunday morning viewing are now some Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) results for a range of NVIDIA GPUs.

For this weekend, one-page benchmarking article are some fairly simple results of using VDPAU with MPlayer while playing back the 1080p version of the Big Buck Bunny movie. The benchmarking is automated by simply installing the Phoronix Test Suite and running phoronix-test-suite benchmark video-cpu-usage or more specifically for this article it was run as MONITOR=gpu.temp,gpu.usage phoronix-test-suite benchmark video-cpu-usage to record the GPU utilization and GPU core temperature beyond just the CPU usage.

The graphics cards used for this comparison with the NVIDIA 343.22 driver on Ubuntu was the GeForce GT 520, GT 610, GTX 680, GTX 750, GTX 750 Ti, GTX 780 Ti, and GTX 980 Maxwell.

With running these tests from a Core i7 Haswell-E system, obviously the CPU usage is very low and if need be the high-end Intel CPU could have easily handled all of the video decoding with the GPU's help -- were mostly looking at other metrics in this article and again it's just a quick, one-page, weekend article.

Of the high-end NVIDIA GPUs tested of previous generations (the GTX 680 and GTX 780 Ti Keplers), the GTX 980 had the lowest operating temperature thanks to the power efficiency of Maxwell... The coolest GPUs overall during the video playback process were the Maxwell-based GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti.

The low-end GT 520 and GT 610 had the highest GPU utilization during the VDPAU decoding process for Big Buck Bunny. The GPU utilization of the GTX 980 was in line with that of the GTX 750 while the lowest GPU usage was actually with the previous-generation GTX 680/780 Ti.

That's the short story and of course the GeForce GTX 980 is more than capable of handling any Linux video tasks tossed its way with ease. If you're looking for a low-power, low-noise graphics card for a Linux HTPC/multimedia system, the GeForce GTX 750 series remain the ideal choice with the proprietary NVIDIA driver. More of this VDPAU test data can be found via the 1410040-LI-GTX980VID66 result file.